cinema history class: bride of the monster

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 2
Movie 2: Bride of the Monster (1955)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
A mad scientist is trying (generally without success) to use nuclear energy to give people superpowers. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
First, my disclaimer -- I missed this week's session because I had to work late.* But I'm writing about it for the sake of completeness. And, since I watched it on Netflix (or was it Amazon? -- I forget) I can comment on the film.

The film is...how do I put it delicately? The film is bad.

A few of the problems with it:

• There are times when it seems that he is kind of self-consciously doing Lugosi shtick -- purposely delivering his lines in an over-the-top fashion.
• Why an octopus? Seriously, The octopus makes no sense, and could have been easily replaced in the script with snakes. Or crocodiles. Hell, since there are already crocodiles, that would have made more sense.
• Maybe Wood used an octopus because he was able to borrow or steal (storrow?) a mechanical octopus from some other production. But the mechanical elements were broken so the actors, trapped in the octopus' grasp had to move the tentacles around themselves in a fruitless attempt to appear to be in mortal danger.
• I got the sense that there was a lot of wasted dialogue. The exchange between the newspaper delivery boy and the cop serves as a good example (though there were others). The movie would have moved along better without these dead-end conversations. I can't help wondering if Wood was trying to pad things out, given how short the movie was.
• The nuclear explosion at the end. Blair conveyed to me that Wood was promised extra cash if he included footage of a nuclear explosion in the film.But the fact that he had the explosion occur within ten feet of the characters makes no sense.

It's hard to know how I would have rated this movie had I seen it in class with the guys, and I won't even attempt a guess.

Ratings:
Blair: 7
Christina: 7.5
Dave: 7, 9 as entertainment
Ethan: 7
Sean: 2 out of 4

*Yeah, it kind of sucks. But if there weren't work to do, they wouldn't pay me to do it.